ISSN: 2158-7051 ==================== INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RUSSIAN STUDIES ==================== ISSUE NO. 6 ( 2017/2 ) |
REVOLUTION IN RUSSIA AND CHINA: 100 YEARS
NORBERT FRANCIS*
Summary
The
Russian and Chinese revolutions are closed related in a number of important
ways. This year, in the Peoples Republic of China, the 100th year
anniversary of the events of 1917 in Russia will be commemorated officially as
an historical antecedent and a political foundation. The further study of this
relationship in history is needed to better understand how each revolution
unfolded. The future direction that China will take, politically and
economically, will to a large extent depend on this understanding. Observers in
Hong Kong and Taiwan will be especially attentive to the discussions this year
about how the events and outcomes of the last 100 years should be evaluated.
Key Words: Russian Revolution, Chinese Revolution, democracy, Constituent Assembly.
Introduction
This year will be marked in China by
the first of three related centennials: the Russian Revolution (1917), followed
by those of the May Fourth Movement (1919) and the founding of the Chinese
Communist Party (1921). Not only does China’s governing party trace a direct
historical continuity to the October 1917 Revolution, it is the largest and
most prominent remaining political party to receive this inheritance, now
carrying its ideological mantle forward first among all others, so to speak.
Worldwide, the celebrations in China will be the most important, for many
reasons, to be followed closely by its citizens, and by observers around the
world.
The
following study is meant to serve as a proposal for discussion. Before starting
at the beginning, our account should take note of the authoritative history of
the May Fourth Movement by Chow Tse-tsung (1960). All of the important
tendencies of the Wuchang Uprising and the new Republic, democrats,
nationalists and socialists, looked to the Russian Revolution as a guiding
example and reached out to it for support. Sun Yat-sen welcomed aid and
guidance from the Comintern. The betrayal by China’s Western Allies at the
Treaty of Versailles Conference, following World War I, only served to confirm
the alternative of seeking alliance with the Russian revolutionaries. They too
had just overthrown a centuries-old monarchical system, thus presenting Chinese
republicans and revolutionaries with a model immediately at hand. Looking back
on these years, it is important not to underestimate the influence of the
Russian Revolution, and in turn important to understand it more completely. The
massive outpouring of student protest, repudiating the imposition of the terms
of Versailles in May of 1919, marked the culmination of the New Culture
Movement (NCM). Today, the framers of Charter 08 correctly evoke the NCM and
its program for “science and democracy.”[1] In this historical
reference, they present a challenge to the current regime regarding who speaks
for the ideals of the most representative political and cultural movement of
the new Republic soon to commemorate one hundred years.
Until
its eclipse and dissolution, the movement gathered together the broadest
mobilization of discussion and debate on the construction of Chinese society in
its struggle to form a unified, democratic and modern republic. They were years
of experimentation, a renaissance in literature, and the reform of language and
writing itself. The proposal for discussion of this essay is that the NCM and
its culmination in May of 1919 finds analogy in the February democratic
revolution in Russia, before its own eclipse and dissolution. The stages of
revolution in Russia were sharply telescoped; in China, for historical reasons
of overriding force of civil war and foreign invasion, they came to be drawn
out over a period of many years (1911—1949). Nevertheless, a striking parallel
in how events unfolded in both Russia and China, according to Professor Chow,
was the weakness of the democratic/liberal coalition, in both cases its
inability to galvanize popular support around a coherent political program.
February to October: Nine months that shook the world
Aside
from its immediate impact on the fate of the fledgling Republic of China, more
than any other single event of the 20th Century the Russian Revolution has shaped
the international political landscape of our time. The disbandment of the
Constituent Assembly in January of 1918 established a one-party regime, soon
leading to the consolidation of a remarkably stable dictatorial system that
expanded to Eastern Europe in 1945 and to East Asia in 1949. Even more
remarkably, in Russia and Europe, it collapsed of its own weight fifty years
later. Last year marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the failed coup d’état
against the democratization of Russia and the independence of the nations that
had been incorporated into the Soviet Union starting in 1922.[2]
While many will still celebrate in
October, the proposal of this retrospective is that the more meaningful commemoration
was in February. The short-lived February Revolution of 1917, while it failed,
is where the story should begin. In history, as elsewhere, failure is usually
more important to study and understand. The lessons to be learned come forward
for reflection more clearly. Related to the study of the failed revolution is
the tracing of events that led to its degeneration and corruption. A commonly
held view marks this breakdown at the late 1920s, after Lenin’s death,
accompanied by the rise to power of undemocratic leaders and a “Stalinist” bureaucracy
that then proceeded to “betray” the revolution. The historical evidence,
however, shows that by that time the Russian Revolution had already been corrupted
and overthrown; the promises of February along with its transitional democratic
institutions had already broken down. There is an account, once widely influential,
today marginal, that the Soviet system did not suffer degeneration and corruption,
and was not “betrayed” until the years 1989—1991 (fall of the Berlin Wall – collapse
of the USSR). For now, we will set consideration of this viewpoint aside, as
well as the more nuanced version that calls attention to the “mistakes” and
“deviations” of the Soviet leadership under Stalin, current explanation given
by the Chinese Communist Party, for example.
Of the democratic revolutions of the
modern era, considering its short duration, it was the most sweeping and
ambitious, organizing Russia’s first national election and convoking the
elected representatives in less than a year. Upon abolishing the monarchy, the
elections were the most democratic of Europe of the time, male and female
suffrage preceding that of the United States by three years. It was no
coincidence that the event that marked the outbreak of the Revolution was the
February 23rd International Women’s Day march. The following day, an
estimated 200,000 workers demonstrated against the war and called for the end
to Tsarist rule. Seven days later, the manifesto of abdication was drafted. The
caretaker Provisional Government, charged with calling the national elections
and convening its delegates, represented the broad coalition of parties that
would oversee the transition from absolutist monarchy to representative
democracy. Along with democracy, the ideal of the Revolution released across
the former empire the hope for freedom of the non-Russian peoples (in the form
of autonomy within a national federation), for land reform to take down the
surviving fetters of pre-capitalist economy in the countryside, the recognition
of union rights, and an end to the war. These aspirations were given form in
the unprecedented mass mobilization of the nationalities, peasants, workers and
soldiers.
This view is not new, conclusion of
many historians, participants and observers who witnessed the unfolding of the Revolution
and its aftermath from within the countries of the Soviet Bloc and from the
outside. However, today, their contribution to our understanding remains
understood only in part. A major roadblock to drawing the lessons of history
has been the more than seventy years of control over archives dating from 1917,
and the inability of Soviet citizens to independently investigate the crimes of
the dictatorship,[3] to give one example. For seven decades,
researchers did the best they could with the information made available from
one historical period to the next. Even so, prior to 1991, enough evidence had
come forward to put most of the puzzle together, including valuable testimony provided
by reporters, participant observers and émigrés (Gorky, 1917[1968]; Kautsky,
1920; Serge 1951[2012]) from the very first months after the fall of the Tsar.
The official Soviet version, supported by the vast resources of the state and
sympathetic academics in the West, nevertheless, greatly complicated the task
of gathering up all the pieces to see where they should fit.
Outside of the Soviet bloc, public
intellectuals who knew, or should have known, better often remained in
complicit silence, bowing to persistent and long term assumptions widely taken
for granted both inside and outside of academia. Many, in turn, even apologized
for the dictatorship, lending active endorsement of the oppressive regimes. The
humanities have been especially affected by this influence, most puzzling in
some ways given the early and deep-going censorship, beginning in 1918,
reaching beyond newspapers to include state control over literature, in 1922
(Echavarren, 2011; Ermolaev, 1997). Writers who spoke out early in their
careers, André Gide, Albert Camus, Octavio Paz, Mario Vargas Llosa, among the
relatively few, often against the current in their respective fields, faced
isolation and condemnation (see Francis, 2015, for a review). Still to this
day, frank and open discussion of the core issues (often with a certain
preference for euphemism) sometimes triggers discomfort and even denial.
Government from coalition to one party
Historians disagree on
some of the important details of the final months of the Provisional Government
leading up to its overthrow in October: the underlying intentions and
dispositions of the leading actors, the level of preparation and pre-planning
on the part of the Bolsheviks during the period preceding the seizure of power,
the symbolic storming of the Winter Palace, the degree of erosion of
Provisional Government authority prior to its replacement, the significance of
its own internal disintegration, crisis and fatal errors. Another way to think
about these questions is to ask: to which best corresponds the description of
coup d’état – the deposing of the Provisional Government ministers in October
or the closing of the Constituent Assembly the following January?
The first crisis of dual-authority (coalition/caretaker government—Petrograd
Soviet) turned on opposition to the war. A popular view was that of the
moderate socialist bloc’s call for a decisive and active approach to
negotiating a separate peace with Germany under the slogan of “without
annexations or indemnities,” in opposition to the policy of “war to victory”
that tied Russia to the Western Allies. The later view was supported by most Constitutional
Democrats, other liberals and in different versions by some figures on the
left. A popular demonstration against the war resulted in a greater representation
from Soviet parties in the coalition caretaker government. In addition, around
the problem of the war coalesced ever mounting demands on the full range of
pressing social and economic problems, rapidly deteriorating, that the
Provisional Government was in no position, between incapable and unwilling, to
resolve. Support surged by the end of August for the Bolsheviks and their radical
allies, along with sentiment for a transfer of authority to an all-Soviet
caretaker government. Inept bungling, confusion, naiveté, and inability to act
on their own platform for negotiating an end to the war, reduced the standing
of the moderate socialists, now leaders of the new Provisional Government, even
further.
By September, Lenin had rejected the idea of a governing
coalition even with the moderate socialists, the Constitutional Democrats the
first to be excluded as “enemies of the people.” Against leading figures in his
own party, he called for armed seizure of power at the earliest possible
opening. The Bolshevik Central Committee, on October 10, reaffirmed the
intention of installing a Soviet government by force of arms, by dispersing the
Provisional Government. Its toppling turned out to be the low-hanging fruit,
dropping with barely a serious skirmish. So ripe the opportunity and so
confident was the core party leadership in its decision that the taking of
control of the strategic points of Petrograd was ordered just ahead of the
previously scheduled meeting of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets. Carried
out in the name of the Congress, at the opening session the large
representation of Mensheviks and right-Socialist Revolutionaries (SR) denounced
the armed take-over and walked out. With an absolute majority and full control,
October 25th, in effect, marks the beginning of virtual single-party
rule. All of the commissars of the hastily formed new Provisional Government, the
Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom), to serve until the convening of the
Constituent Assembly, were members of the Bolshevik party, Lenin appointed as
chairman. Measure of the discredit into which the previous, now dispersed,
Provisional Government had fallen is that in Petrograd news of its demise came
and went with little outward concern, one way or the other. Within weeks, local
soviets throughout Russia lent their support to the new “caretaker” authority
(Wade, 2001).
Returning to our questions, and looking ahead a few
months, a focus on the immediate aftermath of October essentially clears away
the problem of assigning motivation and intention. We can grant, for example,
that the Bolsheviks “unexpectedly” came to hold a monopoly of power at the
Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets which in turn endorsed the overthrow of
the former Provisional Government and installed in its place the Sovnarkom. The
real surprise, for all but a few of the inner circle, however, was the
unambiguous rejection of any variant of coalition among the other socialist and
democratic parties of the February Revolution, or even of a united block of
left-wing parties of the Soviets. The negotiations with the left-SR supported
rail workers union for a broad socialist front (based on the argument that only
such a representative ruling coalition could lead the nation as a whole) were
simply abandoned. In the same way, similar demands by the Mensheviks, right-SRs
and other moderate socialists were rejected. Whatever their intention or plan
was at the beginning of October, by November the decision to impose a
single-party government, for all intents and purposes, had been taken (Swain,
1996). On October 27, the decree on censorship of “counterrevolutionary”
newspapers was signed, and on December 7 the Cheka was formally established. With
selective repression in force a full four weeks before the convening of the
Constituent Assembly, there remained only one trigger for the forces of civil
war to be set into motion. The record of the seventy two days of October 25—January
5 reveals the cascading sequence that in all essential features cemented the
dictatorship that would weather internal factional struggle but would maintain
remarkable stability for the next seventy-three years.
The question about the exact date of the coup d’état can
now also be set aside as less interesting. At some point prior to January 5th,
if (as many hoped or expected) it were possible to mobilize a united front of
the democratic forces of the February Revolution, we could debate whether
October 25th was an attempt, successful in part, a prelude, or a
fortuitous turn of circumstances. As events actually unfolded, the clearest
characterization is that of a coup
[blow] against a democratic revolution that took 72 days to be fully consummated.
Elections
A brief outline of the
events from October to January deserves closer reflection. All parties and
organized factions without exception claimed publicly to support both the
elections of November and the seating of the elected representatives. The
Sovnarkom, in particular, presented
itself as its most effective guarantor. But from what we know today from
studying the systematic blocking of coalition, even of a restricted all
socialist coalition, there can remain no argument that the Bolshevik party
leadership did not project and deliberately prepare for the armed deposing,
now, of the Constituent Assembly. The results of the voting are stunning: over
47 million ballots were cast; in Petrograd and Moscow participation reached
approximately 70%. In many rural areas the turnout was higher. Not only were
the elections the most complete popular expression of any European or Asian
people in history, the assembled delegates consisted of the most progressive
plus left-wing founding national congress ever: Socialist Revolutionary Party –
40.4%, Bolshevik Social Democratic Party – 23.2%, Menshevik Social Democrats – 2.9%,
Non-socialist supporters of the February Revolution (liberals) – 4.6%. The
remaining were divided among other socialist formations – 14.2%, parties of the
national minorities, and other liberals (Kowalsky, 1997: 102).
The hard core of the Bolshevik party (its majority) was evidently
unwilling to form a social democratic government, supported by a national
legislative assembly with a socialist majority of over 75%. Could these
delegates really have been: “…the hirelings of bankers, capitalists and
landlords…the slaves of the American dollar…enemies of the people…the most evil
enemies of socialism,” as the headline the next day in Pravda announced? They were called to order on January 5th
at the Taurida Palace, surrounded by pro-Bolshevik military units. An unarmed
demonstration in support of the Assembly was fired upon and broken up with
fatal casualties as it approached. Troops occupied the auditorium and closed
the proceedings of the first session at 6:00 AM, January 6th. The
same day the Assembly was dissolved by decree of the Sovnarkom. As Lenin
famously remarked to Trotsky: “The dispersal of the Constituent Assembly by
Soviet authority [was] the full and open liquidation of formal democracy in the
name of the revolutionary dictatorship” (Trotsky, 1924, O Lenine: Materialy dlya biografa, p. 94, cited in Volkogonov,
1994, p. 176).
At a meeting of the
Sovnarkom Central Execute Committee (CEC), just prior to dissolution of the
Assembly, a left-SR delegate objected to the decree on press censorship and the
arrest by the Cheka of suspected opponents of the new Bolshevik-led government;
that the approval by the CEC “was support for a system of political terror and [for]
unleashing civil war.” Responding to protests of subsequent arrests of
Constitutional Democratic leaders, Trotsky proclaimed the right of the
proletariat to “finish off” the class that is collapsing:
You wax indignant at the naked terror which we are applying against our
class enemies, but let me tell you that in one month’s time at the most it will
assume more frightful forms, modeled on the terror of the great French
revolutionaries. Not the [prison] fortress but the guillotine will await our
enemies (In Keep, 1979: 177—178).
After January 6th,
the Council of People’s Commissars was no longer called a provisional governing authority. As months passed, the Soviet themselves
began to lose their deliberative and legislative prerogatives, passing over to
become instruments for implementing decisions taken by the party, for
motivating them and for organization and mobilization. Again, it is important
to point out that, as with the replacement of the Provisional Government in
October, the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly did not spark spontaneous
popular opposition in the urban centers. The absence of immediate public
protest is only partially explained by the order of martial law in effect days
prior to the January 5th session and the warning that public
gatherings in the vicinity of the palace would be dispersed by force.
From
a review of the events from October to January, Pipes (1996: 150—167)
characterizes the public reaction in Petrograd and Moscow as “surprising
indifference” (p. 163). Already by the end of the summer, with the war-time
social and economic crisis deteriorating by the day, Russia was exhausted. The
most disciplined and well-organized party, by far, placed its bet on this mood.
The most interesting reaction came from the leadership of the non-Bolshevik
socialist parties that, together, had just won the majority of seats in a
national election. They attempted to mount a resistance to the overthrow of the
Constituent Assembly, but it failed to mobilize an effective coalition of the
democratic forces brought together months later in Samara. Their military
organization was no match for either the White or Red army detachments sent out,
in turn, to crush them. While the socialists abhorred the methods of Lenin and
Trotsky, and tried to gather an army to defend the Assembly, they feared the
possibility of a “counterrevolution” from the right even more. After their
defeat in 1918, they came to harbor a hope that the “excesses” of the dictatorship
would eventually be harnessed and corrected by the rank and file and by the
masses of workers and peasants, as the threat of reaction subsided. Unable or
unwilling to exercise their legal and moral authority, they “denounced [the
Bolsheviks] as usurpers but treated [them] as comrades” (p. 164). To be fair,
by that time their options had pretty much run out. During the (anti-White) Civil
War period, the Mensheviks and SRs returned to the Soviets, long after their
democratic character had been completely eroded (Kowalski, 1997), with the idea
that by working within the system they could perhaps influence the course of events.
By then they all faced a common foe in the White armies. With time, despite the
initial acquiescence, top-down and bottom-up, single-party rule against the
democratic forces of the Revolution turned out to be implemented by increasing force
of violence and conquest. Allowing the socialist parties to return and
participate in the Soviets also turned out to be temporary, even for the
left-SRs.
The civil war(s)
The left-SR delegate to
the Sovnarkom CEC warned his revolutionary allies of the
imminent consequences of a coup d’état, to be carried out in two cities of a
former empire that in 1917 was the world’s second largest. Historians differ in
describing the Russian Civil War as a single complex conflict, or as parallel
civil wars overlapping in time. To get a better idea of this complexity we need
to return to three of the five axes of the mobilization of the previous
February mentioned at the beginning of this essay: for democracy, freedom for
the nationalities, and land reform. Recall that the other two were: the right
of workers to organize independent unions and an end to the war.[4]
Against
democracy
The Red
Terror against the regime’s political opponents can be considered the first
civil war (or “phase of,” as it were) in its repression of democracy, beginning
even prior to the formal cancelling of its highest and most authoritative
expression on January 6. The Terror’s primary instrument, the Cheka,
specialized in the fabrication of conspiracies (the nonexistent
“Petrograd Armed Organization,” the “Anti-Soviet Tactical Center Group,” the
“Union for the Regeneration of Russia,” the show trial conducted in 1920), extrajudicial mass execution, and the administration of the Gulag,
established in 1918, not during the 1930s as is often assumed (Pipes, 2014).
Among its victims not only counted professors and writers sympathetic to the
Constitutional Democrats, but moderate socialists opposed to the dissolution of
the Constituent Assembly, and other class enemies, including, by firing squad,
ex-Tsar Nicolas, his wife, their five children and four members of the domestic
staff. By the winter of 1919, individual
assassination and hostage-taking began to take the place of large scale and
indiscriminate repression, with some exceptions (as in the case of the “Taganstev
conspiracy” of 1921 in which the approximately 60 victims were executed at the
site of their unmarked grave on the outskirts of Petrograd).
By the conclusion of the Civil War against the White armies, marked by
the sentences carried out against the rebellious Kronstadt sailors and the
exile to detention camps of the survivors, Russia had become a police state in
every sense of the term. The GPU succeeded the Cheka in 1922. Setting aside for
now the casualties among protesting peasants (see the “third civil war” below),
the repression against opposition parties and government opponents (the “first civil
war,” in large part urban) could have numbered between 100,000 and 150,000 non-combatant
civilian deaths previous to, during, and after the conflict with the White
generals. Neither an aberration nor an “excess,” the decision by the party to
rule alone apparently left the leaders no other alternative, as their left-SR friends
and allies had warned them. Looking back, years later, Trotsky explained why
this was so, giving the example of the execution of the Tsar’s family: “…not
only to frighten, horrify and instill a sense of hopelessness in the enemy but
also to shake up our own ranks, to demonstrate that there was no retreating…”
(1935[1956]:81).
The first five demands in the petition of Kronstadt were for: (1) genuine
secret ballot elections to the Soviets, which had become simple transmission
belts, by hand vote, for party decisions, (2) freedom of speech, (3) right of
assembly (especially for trade unions), (4) a conference for non-party workers
and soldiers, and (5) release of political prisoners of the socialist parties (Pravda o Kronshtadte, 1921, in Avrich,
1970: 73—74). Trotsky (1921[1979]) responded in the March 23 issue of Pravda: “The counterrevolutionary
riffraff, the SR blowhards and simpletons, the Menshevik garbage…all of
them…perform one and the same historical function: they support every attempt
to establish the unlimited sway of the bandits of world imperialism…The backbone
of this dictatorship is the Communist Party. There is no other party that can
play this part, no can there be. If
you wish to break this backbone, do you, dear sirs of the Menshevik and SR
parties? The experience of four years of revolution is not enough for you, then?”
(emphasis added) (p. 73).
Against the
national minorities
The second
civil war was fought against the nationalities who took for good coin the declarations
in favor of the right to self-determination. Each case was different, one more
complicated than the next, and all intersecting with other aspects of the
breakdown of the February Revolution and the war against the actual
counterrevolution. For Lenin and Trotsky, this Civil War (in caps now) was the
pretext for everything, even after it was effectively over; “counterrevolutionary”
the ideal epithet to vilify and convict. A summary glimpse at only the most
representative cases, against Poland and the Baltics, Ukraine, and Georgia,
gives us an idea of what actually was, or should have been, at stake for
Russia. The price that the Russian people paid, the unnecessary casualties and
diversion of military resources suffered by Red Army troops, to point out only
one example, was far from negligible (Swain, 1996).
The Baltic offensive of November-December 1918, followed by the
short-lived “socialist governments” proclaimed in Narva, Riga and Vilnius, is
generally forgotten because it ended with the Treaties of Tartu, Riga and
Moscow (with Lithuanian), and Soviet recognition of independence. But that was
because Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania prevailed in their determined defense
against invasion. Clearly made possible by complex foreign, and shifting and
confusing, foreign intervention (most notably Britain), Baltic forces were
compelled to fight on two fronts, against both the Soviet invading armies and
German forces who opposed their sovereignty as well. German units were finally
expelled by force of arms by Estonian and Latvian fighters with the help of
British diplomatic pressure. Recall that the nationalities had favored autonomy
within a democratic Russia, in part as a guarantee against German domination
(Wade, 2001). Independence came forward as a national aspiration as the
Revolution descended into one-party autocracy enforced by the methods of the
Cheka. For example, carrying out the first phase of the Red Terror in Estonia
and Latvia, especially brutal and costly for the latter, between October and
the overthrow of the Constituent Assembly in January, decisively swayed public
opinion toward independence (Lieven, 1993).
The futile assault by the Red Army on Warsaw was not a defense of the workers’
state against the advance of the White armies either, but part of an irresponsible
adventure driven by the idea of exporting, by invasion, world revolution to Central
Europe (Volkogonov, 1998), wasting the lives of 20,000—30,000 Russian and
Polish soldiers in the siege and defense of the city alone. Poland was not just
another minority ethnic group of the former empire, but prior to its
subjugation by Tsarist Russia, an independent country and a proud nation. Nineteen
years later, Stalin and Hitler, in concert, would be successful in subjugating
Poland and the Baltics. In the meanwhile, as was the case for all the other
nationalities, the opposition of the Whites to independence actually
contributed in the end to the Whites’ defeat. The Polish pro-independence leadership,
in negotiations with the Red Army, gave them a free hand against (White general)
Denikin’s forces in critically important operations in the Ukraine.
Foreign intervention in the failed Ukrainian War of Independence was even
more complicated than in the Baltics, not to mention the bloody military
operations and pogroms of the Russian White army and others. The Ukrainian Central
Council (Rada), arising from the February Revolution with its social democratic
majority, in like manner as all other nationalities, initially favored autonomy
within a federated Russia. The first Provisional Government in Petrograd
half-heartedly accepted the principle. The Rada protested its dissolution in
October 1917, refused to recognize the Sovnarkom, rejected the Bolsheviks
ultimatum, and moved closer to declaring independence with the calling of the
Ukrainian People’s Republic (UNR). Upon the final overthrow of democratic
institutions with the closing of the Constituent Assembly, the UNR declared
independence two weeks later (temporarily, Soviet Russia in fact recognized it
as one of the concessions of the short-lived Brest-Litovsk Treaty). Large pro-independence
majorities in the Ukrainian congresses resulted in the walkout of Bolshevik
supporters, the establishment of competing congresses (by all accounts minority,
and drawing mainly from the ethnic Russian population), followed soon after by
the invasion of the Red Army. The moderate socialist government, which unsuccessfully
attempted to implement political pluralism and application of the rule of law,
in an emerging nation of undefined borders, splintered (and in perpetual chaos)
with claims on it by powerful neighbors on all sides, weakened by internal
division, some bad political choices, and an untested, barely cohesive, and
undisciplined military compared to the Red Army, went down to defeat (Kamenetsky,
1977). Of course, the most speedy, effective and lasting
strategy to defeat the real counterrevolution, the armies of Denekin, Wrangel
and Drozdovsky, would have been for the Bolsheviks to honor the recognition of
the UNR (respecting the right of self-determination, by the way) and propose a
united front with the majority socialist Rada (which would have been
immediately accepted) in defense of the gains of the democratic Russian
Revolution. But the formation of such a united front would have meant walking
back the program of single-party rule. On the matter of long-term strategies,
we will return to the Ukraine one last time in the section on the civil war
(the third) against the peasantry.
The Georgian Soviets and subsequent
local congresses were also led by socialists (the Menshevik Party). They
protested the October take-over of the Provisional Government in Petrograd; and
the overthrow of the Constituent Assembly ended the hope of resolving the
pressing challenges of democratization and self-determination of the peoples of
the Caucasus by an elected national Russian authority. The Democratic Republic
of Georgia was declared five months later. Of all the independent
nationalities, it was able to govern most successfully with some measure of
stability, carrying out an ambitious land distribution and nationalization of
industry and transportation. Interestingly, up until the end, party officials
in Moscow debated and openly disagreed on how to deal with the Georgian socialists,
in part because of diplomatic pressure from abroad, including positive
international assessments of the Tiflis government (Suny, 1994). Nevertheless, by
the second half of 1920, the now practiced procedure of takeover was already in
motion: local pro-Bolshevik factions challenge the governing majority of a
congress or soviet, walk out to establish a competing entity, conduct
subversion and violent upheaval, foment uprising in ethnic Russian enclaves, and
invite intervention to rescue loyalists from “the counterrevolution.” On
February 16 a mechanized invasion force twice as large as the Georgian national
militia crossed the border. Despite a courageous defense, within a week the
capital was taken.
Against the
village
The third
civil war, against the peasantry, was part of the campaign (a political
mobilization), of the so-called “War Communism.” This political campaign
coincided, in time (and also with the various confounding military objectives),
with the Civil War against the White armies. It was completed, reaching its
climax (essentially after the defeat of the Whites) during the fierce military incursions
into the countryside of 1921—1922. The three year ultra-radical economic
program that preceded the temporary concession to the free market (the New
Economic Plan, promulgated in 1921) is often presented as a necessary excess, unavoidable
wartime measure, to save the Revolution. Rather, evidence shows that its
extreme and fanatical, ideologically-driven, methods to forcefully and rapidly
eradicate all vestiges of capitalist relations and bourgeois culture greatly
hindered the struggle against the Whites. Industrial and agricultural
production plummeted from pre-1917 levels. The top to bottom socialization of
the economy imposed compulsory labor service linked to party control of trade
unions and massive nationalization of economic activity, the attempt to abolish
money, private trade, the price system and the market, the provision of goods
and services free or at nominal cost, including housing, and government
distribution and rationing of food. The appropriation of food by the state for
its distribution was made possible by its forced requisition from producers in
the countryside. In comparison to the first wave of expropriations, every
successive foray into the villages by militarized grain collectors and local
squadrons of enforcers netted less and less. The vicious cycle of retribution
against the peasant “hoarders” and resistance to the injustice resulted in
grave shortages of the “free and subsidized” bread in the city, and outright
famine in the countryside. Aside from the disruption to the economy, this
aspect of “War Communism” in an even more obvious way obstructed the objectives
of the Civil War as the Red Army was forced to engage both the Whites and
veritable armies of peasants resisting requisition and repression by the Cheka.
The complexity here is analogous to the situation of the national minorities who
found their forces divided between the struggle against the invading Red Army,
the retreating/advancing Germans and White armies (even as alliances shifted
constantly, cooperating with the latter against the Red Army, and vice versa).
Requisition, resistance and spiraling shortage affected the Russian
agricultural provinces across the board, among which the most productive were the
hardest hit (Swain, 1997). Returning to the example of the Ukraine from the
previous section, regarding the long-term consequences of the imposition of
Bolshevik one-party rule, with the first dress rehearsal nationalization came
the widespread hunger and famine of 1921 (followed by a reprieve of the NEP). With
the second appropriation, in the form of collectivization (1932—1933), came the
near genocide of the Holodomor.
The cycles of violence, in fact, reached
historical proportions. In the winter of 1920—21, with the White armies
effectively defeated, a renewed military campaign was directed against the
peasant uprisings (the so-called Green armies) in Western Siberia, Middle
Volga, Ukraine and the Don and Kuban regions, the most infamous targeting the organized
revolt in Tambov province (Volkogonov, 1994: 338—355). The effects of so-called
“War Communism” had been accumulating from 1918, of government control and
confiscation coupled with the fomenting of “class-warfare” within the peasantry.
The villages had been reduced to desperate poverty. Their resistance was met
with the same level of brutality as was met the rebellion of the Kronstadt
sailors, but on a massive scale. In the Tambov region alone, estimates of total
casualties among the local population included over 200,000 killed. In the end,
the irony was that as the defeated leader of the revolt who had called for the
reconvening of the Constituent Assembly and professed allegiance to the SR
party, A. Antonov, was being hunted down, the Bolsheviks conceded to the peasants’
key economic demands with the inauguration of the NEP (Kowalski, 1997: 231—235).
Nevertheless, as retribution, the second show trial of the Bolshevik period was
held the following year against the remaining national leadership of the SR
party.
Lessons of February and
October
We can only
speculate about what the outcome of the Civil War to defeat the Whites would
have been under different circumstances, i.e., unimpeded by the civil wars of
choice. A united democratic coalition government with full authority vested in
it by the overwhelming majority vote of the Russian people would have faced a very
different task. Militarily and politically, it would have been one task, not
four, precluding: the organization of the mass Red Terror against democracy,
export of the civil war (the Bolshevik political program) to Poland and Germany
and denial of self-determination to the nationalities, and the war to impose requisition/pre-collectivization
on the countryside and rationing/militarization of labor in the city. Then
there are the problems of the lead up to single-party rule, by January of 1918 under
the conditions and requirements of dictatorship. These were the contexts and
imperatives that recommended to Lenin and Trotsky the option of the multi-front
civil wars. The majority parties of the February Revolution, in particular the
moderate socialists, also failed the test of leadership; we might grant that
they didn’t count on previous historical example.
True enough, the Bolsheviks prior to
October, without the administrative responsibilities of a caretaker government,
could promise everything. The slogan and call to arms can be short on the
details, summed up in 1917 in just three words, rather than: civil war and internationalization
of the class struggle, pre-collectivization of land, and rationing of bread.
But the democratic parties, including the non-socialist, also bear
responsibility for the breakdown of the February Revolution, of a different
kind. Indecision and stalling on immediate priorities could not wait for the
deliberations of a national congress: recognizing the right to autonomy of the
nationalities, decisive initiatives to satisfy the demand for land reform and
for basic rights of the workers (Kowalski, 1997), implementation of their own
program of defense coupled with immediate negotiation to end the war, to
mention just a few measures that were both just and reasonable. The most costly
error was Kerensky’s unprincipled maneuver to gain military advantage at the
war front in the July offensive, ending in miserable failure. Small wonder that
the Mensheviks so rapidly lost their majority in the Soviets, ceding the field
to forces that offered the most sweeping solutions (by appearance simpler and
more direct) to a crisis spinning out of control. The same indecision marked
their unwillingness to call for and organize a mass mobilization and armed
defense of the transitional democratic institutions against the coup d’état as
it was unfolding. Months after the fact, the attempt at formation in Samara of
the Committee for the All-Russian Constituent Assembly (Komuch) was
already too late.
Whether the outcome of the confusion
and disintegration of 1917—1918 was inevitable or not we will leave for
historians to take up, an important debate in its own right. But the more
interesting question, the more practical one in some ways, is the following:
what is the Russian Revolution, in its different stages, a model for today when
we think about democracy and progressive social change? Despite the lessons
learned from the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet system,
many still look to the first overthrow of Russian democracy as a positive
model. This point of view remains a mystery today, especially after all that we
have learned since the years 1989—1991. Most interestingly for the purposes of
our topic, of the five remaining single-party regimes that trace their
political heritage to October 1917, four are clustered together geographically
in East Asia.
There is one last observation that is relevant to the comparison between
the early and later Russian Soviet regimes. Setting aside the deaths in excess
caused by government policy during the respective famines of each period, the total
calculation of the number of extra-judicial executions and murders of
non-combatants during the Red Terror (1918—1922, of Lenin and Trotsky) and the
Great Terror (1936—1938, of Stalin) is roughly equivalent.[5] What many among the
defenders of the former seem to have found perverse and scandalous was the
execution by Stalin of long-time loyal party
members and the erratic and idiosyncratic nature of the repression (e.g.,
targeting the senior officer corps of the Red Army on the eve of the Nazi
invasion), not the repression itself.
The next installment of this discussion will return to the topic that introduced this paper: how 1917 influenced the May Fourth Movement of 1919, leading to the successful founding of the Chinese Communist Party two years later, today with a membership of over 88 million active members. From a small and persecuted minority in 1921, it formed a revolutionary government in Beijing twenty eight years later, exercising virtually undisputed rule over the mainland ever since. Most importantly, how is it that, despite the historical parallels, it did not collapse as did the Russian party that inspired its founding? The Communist Parties of the USSR and Eastern Europe fell from power virtually without a struggle together with the fall of their system.[6]
[1]The English translation of Charter 08 is available in the
January 15, 2009 issue of the New York
Review of Books: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2009/01/15/chinas-charter-08/
[2]For now, the political and moral
crisis into which Russia has descended in recent years, since the 1990s, is a
separate topic that needs to be deferred.
[3]See reports of recent activity by the St.
Petersburg Memorial Research and Information Centre, example among other groups of descendant families
to rescue the approximately 4,500 remains from the mass graves of the
Kovalevsky Forest, dating from period of the Red Terror:
[4]With the regimentation of the work
force, independent trade unions essentially ceased to exist by 1921 (now
superfluous in a “workers’ state”). With conclusion of the Civil War,
compulsory labor service and the militarization of labor were elevated to a
principle of socialist organization of society (Trotsky, 1922: 128—176). In his
memoirs, Serge (1951[2012]) recalls: “The social system in these years
was later called ‘War Communism.’ At the time it was called simply ‘Communism,’
and anyone who like myself went so far as to consider it purely temporary was
looked upon with disdain. Trotsky had just written that this system would last
over several decades if the transition to a genuine unfettered Socialism were
to be assured” (p. 135). The implementation
of the program of turning the “imperialist war into civil war” (Lenin, 1915
[1939]), carried out with specific and ambitious political objectives in large
part unrelated to defense against the White counterrevolution, cynically turned
the tables on the aspiration of the Russian people for peace (“…Land and Bread”
was the other part of the slogan of 1917).
[5]See Volkogonov
(1994, 1998) on the leaking and subsequent opening (by 1991) of the Soviet
archives, allowing, first and above all, for the rehabilitation of accused
conspirators, framed by the security services during the Red Terror,
revelations in which he himself, clandestinely, played an important role during
the 1980s.
[6]I take
responsibility for the limited number of citations in this essay, for
neglecting to cite the contribution of writers and scholars who have helped to
form what some day might be the emerging consensus on the aftermath of the
Russian Revolution and its extension to Eastern Europe: Svetlana Alexievich, Anne Applebaum, Vadim Birstein, Vladimir
Bukovsky, Robert Conquest, Orlando Figes, Ziva Galili, Robert Gellately, Bengt
Jangfeldt, George Leggett,
Martin Malia, Evan Mawdsley, David Sattler, Robert Service, Nicolas Werth, Alexander Yakovlev, and for failing
to mention the example of many others.
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*Norbert Francis - Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (1994), teaches at Northern Arizona University. His current research project focuses on problems of literary creation and musical cognition in cross-language and cross-cultural contact. The present article is a follow-up to “The Trotsky-Shklovsky debate: Formalism versus Marxism,” IJORS (January 2017), No. 6/1. e mail: norbert.francis@nau.edu
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